Film Library

PICTURE CHARACTER explores the complex, conflict-prone, and often hilarious world of the creators, lovers, and arbiters of emoji, our world’s newest pictorial language.

To A More Perfect Union: U.S. v Windsor tells a story of love, marriage and a fight for equality. The film chronicles unlikely heroes — octogenarian Edie Windsor and her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, on their quest for justice. Beyond the story of what became the pivotal case in the marriage equality movement and the compelling personal, legal and political stories behind it, the film also chronicles our continued journey as a people, as a culture, and as citizens with the promise of equal rights.

One trans man’s pioneering quest to fulfill an age-old desire: to start his own family.

In the last few days of her pregnancy, a terrified mother-to-be kidnaps a maternal stranger for an afternoon of hijinks.

Alatha’s father calls himself a Mover. Using African dance moves, he helps kids in Khayelitsha township to transcend their hardship (drugs, poverty and abuse) and “find their superpowers.” The Mover is also a single father. And while he has helped many kids, he still has difficulty getting his own daughter to find her own powers. But in a tender moment together, this is all about to change.

PERSONHOOD tells a different reproductive rights story – one that ripples far beyond the right to choose and into the lives of every pregnant person in America. Tammy Loertscher’s fetus was given an attorney, while the courts denied Tammy her constitutional rights and sent her to jail. Through her story, the film reframes the abortion debate to encompass the growing system of laws that criminalize and police pregnant women. At the intersection of the erosion of women’s rights, the war on drugs, and mass incarceration, Tammy’s experience reveals the dangerous consequences of these little-known laws for American women and families.

With many of Africa’s key species, including elephants, reaching levels near extinction, Akashinga is a radical, new and highly effective weapon against poaching. Founded by former Australian special forces soldier and anti-poaching leader Damien Mander, the women-only team of rangers, drawn from the abused and marginalized, is revolutionizing the way animals are protected and communities are empowered — and its members’ own lives are being transformed. Mander’s innovative approach to conservation calls for community buy-in rather than full-on armed assault against poachers: If a community understands the economic benefits of preserving animals, then it will eliminate poaching without an armed struggle. This short film is a celebration of the courage, conservation and unorthodox thinking that’s leading to massive positive change.

This is the story of a superstar athlete- and why the sports industry hasn’t put her on your radar. AJ Andrews is the first woman to win a Rawlings Gold Glove, an award given to the best fielders in baseball for decades. But winning the Gold Glove did not change the fact that Andrews earns less than $15k a year in an industry more willing to pay female athletes to model than to play their sport.

A deeply intimate portrait of mothers and daughters and the effects of trauma, JACINTA follows a young woman in and out of prison as she attempts to break free from an inherited cycle of addiction, incarceration, and crime.

Filmed over five years in Kansas City, this documentary follows four kids – beginning at ages 4, 7, 12, and 15 – as they redefine “coming of age.” These kids and their families reveal intimate realities of how gender is re-shaping the family next door in a never-before-told chronicling of growing up transgender in the heartland. The film is a nuanced examination of how families tussle, transform, and sometimes find unexpected purpose in their identities as transgender families.

Taking a look behind the headlines of #MeToo and Time’s Up, NEVERTHELESS follows the intimate stories of 7 individuals who have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace or school context. From a writer’s assistant on a top TV show to a Tech CEO and 911 dispatcher, the film shines a light on the ways in which we can shift our culture and rebuild. Nevertheless we persist.

My mother’s own story has often been lost or misinterpreted to serve a myth. This elegant film about her ― the real Vivian Liberto, not the Hollywood version ― is painful but compassionate, wrenching but true. Even though she was an intensely private woman, I think she longed to have her story told, and her place in the history of my family acknowledged with respect and love. Matt Riddlehoover and Dustin Tittle have succeeded in giving her that place. My sisters and I are deeply moved by and grateful for My Darling Vivian. -Rosanne Cash